Alexandra Simo is a creativity coach, professor, and author.
This year, when it came time to grade my students’ work, I knew something was different.
In my nine years of teaching and lecturing at various Ontario universities, I’ve learned that anxiety is normal at the end of the school year. But this year, rationality has vanished like a mammoth, and the sometimes crazy thinking that comes with Gen Z, combined with old concepts like deadlines, has led them to believe strange things: that sabotage could jeopardize their entire grade, or that an assignment they haven’t graded would suddenly disappear like a rabbit in a top hat and automatically get a zero. I received these anxieties by email at all hours of the day and night, or worse, emails from my boss saying that a student had contacted me..
Anxiety has begun to permeate every aspect of education. As university professors, it influences how we teach. When I started teaching at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies in 2015, we were advised to lecture for 30 minutes and then solidify the new material with exercises. Today, I lecture for 15 minutes before I start to fear that my students will succumb to anxiety. We are told not to expect that some students will fall asleep or lose concentration; they may, and did, skip class, get bored, or just walk away. We are told not to expect students to write grammatically, presumably because the sustained concentration required for self-correction is too much for a neurotic student’s brain to handle.
As a writer who has struggled with severe anxiety in the past, I know that many of the behaviors that seem apathetic, rude, or lazy are driven by anxiety-inducing self-doubt. Worry affects the brain’s amygdala, a peanut-sized collection of neurons at the base of the brain stem, a tiny structure with extraordinary ambitions. It affects productivity, sleep, learning, concentration, ability to sit still, time management, memory, decision-making, and virtually every activity needed to complete college (and get a job after graduation).
We need students to learn how to overcome these challenges. They need to be equipped with decision-making skills.. They need to be able to keep their cool and be able to deal with all the changes that are predicted for the next 20 years: more pandemics, more wildfires, more heat warnings, more droughts, more floods, more climate refugees, more food insecurity, widening income inequality, etc. They need to be able to figure out how to navigate all of this and find hope.
Certainly, provincial governments are beginning to recognize the problem, regardless of its magnitude and complexity, and are beginning to implement mental health education. Ontario has introduced $114 million in its school mental health budget for 2023-24, which it says is a 555 percent increase since 2018. British Columbia has introduced a school mental health strategy that focuses on prevention, health promotion and early intervention, and includes anxiety workshops in schools. Alberta recently announced $148 million for school mental health support. The federal government has also taken notice, with the Liberal Party announcing in April a new $500 million youth mental health fund.
To prepare kids, the Toronto Youth Service is calling for a list of necessary changes in schools, including making mental health literacy mandatory in the Ontario curriculum, mental health days for students, data collection on school services and adding more mental health staff such as psychologists, social workers, guidance counsellors and crisis intervention workers.
And today’s young people suggest these changes are desperately needed: 79 per cent of Ontario students said they struggle to access mental health support at school, according to a 2023 survey released by Toronto Youth Services.
It took me more than 20 years of therapy, exercise, and meditation study to go from a neurotic teenager with anxiety disorders to an adult who works, teaches, and writes. My recovery was relatively leisurely in the 1980s, a time of relative social stability and social, economic, and health progress that was taken for granted. I had the luxury of time to recover and grow, something that today’s students do not have, as the list of modern social ills continues to grow.
